This Student Took the Saying "Don’t Say Anything if It’s Not Nice” to a New Level

How many times have you heard this before: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

I know I have a lot over the years!

But this story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page has a bit of a twist.

Read on to see what happened.

“If you don’t have a good review, don’t say anything at all!” Say no more.

“This happened years and years ago when my school had taken us on a 2 day field trip to a hill station close to the city.

All of us on the trip were kids who were in the 6th-8th grade. The trip was a blast, and everyone had fun. The event happened just before we were supposed to leave.

So, our school had a weird policy where after every field trip, they would gather all the students in one room, and pick out a random group of students and ask them to say a couple sentences about the venue and experience, whatever.

Five of us were chosen for it this time, and were asked to wait in an adjacent room and come out one by one. It was all cool till the first girl went up to the mic and said “The experience was nice, but I felt that the food that was served was stale. I think a few people got sick”.

As soon as she finished speaking, the Vice Principle flew into a RAGE as she descended on this poor girl and started screaming. “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? THESE GUYS HAVE BEEN WORKING SUPER HARD FOR US ALL WEEKEND!! IF YOU DONT HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY, DONT SAY ANYTHING AT ALL!”

Now her reaction might not make sense, but the hotel where we were staying at belonged to some relative of hers, which is probably why we were there in the first place, and she felt some type of way about it. That girl almost started crying as she came back to us. I was next up so I was standing and waiting, but the VP went on a long rant about “being well behaved” and “setting a good example”.

I think at this point its worth talking about one of the other kids chosen to do this pointless exercise. He was an older kid in the 8th grade, and he had an accident on the trip, so his arm was slinged up. The accident was (I think) caused partly by negligence from the hotel staff (im blanking on the details right now) and he was fully prepared to talk about it.

So this tantrum made him especially pi**ed, especially because the SAME VP had refused to send him home early from the trip because it would ‘cost too much’ (he told us this later). This guy holds my arm and tells me “Hey, she said dont say anything if its not good, so dont say anything!”

… so I went out, stood there for a few seconds, said “I dont have anything to say.” and came back. The kids who went after me did the same. This guy went last.

He goes up to the mic, and at this point the VP is shouting again “DID YOU DO THIS? DONT YOU DARE SAY NOTHING” or something of this sort. He says “I loved being here, glad that I was able to be here even after I hurt my arm, I will be really sad now that I have to go back to my parents and an actual doctor.”

The vice principal lost her s**t at that. Most of the kids were too young to understand sarcasm, but they definitely did start laughing at her. She threatened to suspend/fine everyone there, and she delayed the buses back to our town by 2 hours as “punishment”.

A few days later, they called my parents in for a disciplinary hearing, and the VP started narrating the story to them. When she got to the point about the complaint from that first girl, my dad said “wait, so the hotel was serving stale food?”.

I think the VP kinda got shook by that a bit because I was asked to go back to class shortly after, and nothing else came of it.”